Smart City Barcelona Becomes an Information Broker

Rather than starting disparate technology projects, the municipality has to take the larger view of how to design the city’s infrastructure.Photo: RFID & Wireless IoT Global

Barcelona is connecting all city data on an open source platform

With the launch of the new open source CityOS platform at the end of 2017, Barcelona hits an important milestone for its “Barcelona Digital City 2017-2020” plan. The goal is to make the city more open, equitable, and participatory. The first smart city projects in Barcelona began in 2006. Since then, the Catalonian metropolis has field tested and implemented various smart city applications, and created an open source data infrastructure which facilitates to citizens and companies the use of applications that need city data.

Yolanda Gordo, Jordi Ortuño, and Jordi Cirera of Ajuntament de Barcelona, in an interview with RFID & Wireless IoT Global

Data connected with the Sentilo platform

The basis for all smart city projects in Barcelona is the collection of data. This approach is facilitated by one of the first city IoT platforms, Sentilo. The platform allows for the gathering and processing, data from various sensors. The development of Sentilo began in 2011. The platform was launched at the 2013 Barcelona IoT Congress and went open source in 2014.

“Sentilo enabled us to go from technology field tests to city-wide, connected application projects. What‘s important is not the sensors, but the application using them. Sentilo makes it easier to build the applications and deploy the data. It just connects everything – nothing more, nothing less,” Jordi Cirera states.

15,000 sensors for Barcelona utilities

Today, Sentilo manages 15,000 sensors in Barcelona, most of which are smart meters in municipal buildings and photovoltaic power generators. Connecting city utilities enables the administration to analyse the energy efficiency of buildings and areas. Through the sensors, the municipality found out that in some municipal buildings, the air conditioning was running throughout the night. The next step will be connecting smart water meters in buildings, especially in public pools, in order to trace leaks. In addition, there are currently over 100 noise sensors deployed throughout the city and more are installed whenever public works are completed.

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